Marianna Vyshemirskaya, the famous young woman whose photograph was used to illustrate an alleged Russian air strike on Mariupol Maternity Ward No. 3, gave a lengthy interview to Press TV journalist Johnny Miller. With his permission, I have translated this interview into French, where Marianna explains what really happened on 9 March 2022.
At the end of November 2022, Press TV’s Johnny Miller was able to interview at length Marianna Vyshemirskaya, the famous young woman whose photograph, taken by an Associated Press journalist, was used to illustrate an alleged Russian air strike on Mariupol Maternity Ward No 3 on 9 March 2022.
As Johnny Miller has made available the original video files of the interview, and with his kind permission, I have translated into French a larger portion of his interview with Marianna than was published by Press TV:
This interview is interesting for several reasons. First of all, Marianna confirms in this interview what she said in her first interview after arriving in Donetsk at the end of March 2022, namely that there was no Russian air strike on Mariupol Maternity Ward No. 3 where she was staying. There was an explosion outside the building, which blew out the windows and plasterboard walls, but there was no sound of an aeroplane either before or after.
She also confirms that Ukrainian soldiers had moved into the hospital where the maternity ward was located, effectively turning the building into a military target. Her testimony is confirmed by two other testimonies, that of Nikolai, filmed after his evacuation from the city, and another young woman, Viktoria, interviewed in Mariupol itself (see video below).
Viktoria confirms that the Ukrainian soldiers were in the maternity ward, and that something (a shell) fell on the exploding tanks, which would explain the size of the crater. These three testimonies invalidate that of a woman interviewed by France Info, who claimed that there were no Ukrainian soldiers in the hospital and that there had been an air strike.
However, in view of the methods used by Western journalists in this case, as described by Marianna in her interview, one can legitimately wonder about the veracity of the testimony of this woman interviewed by France Info.
For a start, the Associated Press journalist, Mstislav Chernov, who photographed her on 9 March 2022, when she had just come out of the maternity ward after the explosion, did so without her consent! Marianna openly said that she did not want to be photographed, a wish that should have been respected! Yet the journalist made it seem as if he was no longer filming her, but continued to do so. This alone makes one wonder about the ethics of this journalist. And when we see that another journalist from the same agency was recently fired for writing an article falsely accusing Russia of bombing Poland, and what a third did with the first interview Marianna gave on 10 March 2022, we can see that the problem is not limited to one journalist at the Associated Press.
Indeed, the day after the famous explosion, Marianna was interviewed by another Associated Press journalist accompanied by Evgueny Maloletka, a photographer from the agency, after she had given birth by caesarean section. She made it clear that there was no air strike, just an explosion that blew out the windows and plasterboard walls.
Except that once published, the interview does not contain the mention of the absence of an air strike. Marianna later asked the journalist for an explanation, and he made up the excuse that what she was saying was not understandable, and that he had cut it off. Marianna then asked him to publish the whole interview, to check what he was saying. Unsurprisingly, the Associated Press journalist then pretended he had not seen her request.
Other journalists, such as those from the New York Times, cut off contact after Marianna answered several of their questions. It seems that the young woman was not telling them what they wanted to hear…
The last interesting point is that she managed to be contacted by many Western journalists to whom she willingly gave an interview (including the BBC), but those from France Info claim not to have been able to reach her.
This leaves two hypotheses: either these journalists are so bad at making contact that they are unable to find a way to contact a blogger who not only has an Instagram account, but also a Telegram channel open to comments (!!!), in which case they would have to change jobs, or what Marianna was saying didn’t suit them (as it did to the journalists of the New York Times) and they preferred to pretend that they hadn’t been able to get hold of her, rather than go out of their way to film an interview that didn’t fit their narrative.
In any case, this interview with Marianna sheds a lot of light on the way Western journalists covered the story of the alleged air strike on Mariupol Maternity Ward No. 3, going so far as to tamper with an interview to hide the fact that the reality did not fit their narrative.
Christelle Néant
Translation: Vz yan
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